Julia is a sixth-grader growing up in a southern California suburb and coping with the usual
troubles with boys, fickle girlfriends and soccer practice, when, one sunny Saturday morning, it is
learned that the Earth’s rotation has begun to alter.

Karen Thompson Walker’s touching, observant and poetic first novel,
The Age of Miracles, follows the first year of what comes to be called “the slowing” from
Julia’s point of view, paying equal attention to the global consequences and the personal ones.

At first, it’s a quiet change. Extra time may be “bulging from the smooth edge of each day like
a tumor beneath skin,” but there is “no footage to show on television.”

Then changes become more dramatic. As gravity increases, birds die, first individually, and then
in flocks. Without a set amount of sunlight, grass withers and trees die, and as ocean currents
shift and tides “come loose,” whales by the hundreds beach themselves on the shoreline.

As the days grow longer, a conflict grows between “clock timers” and “real timers.” The
government institutes a 24-hour day, which means that half the time people are going to school or
work in total darkness and trying to sleep during long, bright days. Others attempt to adhere to “
real time,” sleeping or waking for ever longer periods. When they’re ignored or persecuted by those
around them, they head out to unsettled areas to form their own communities.

Meanwhile, Julia’s personal life is increasingly disturbed. Her best friend, a Mormon, moves
with her family to Utah, and the boy she has a crush on copes with the death of his mother from
cancer. Her grandfather begins to hoard things, and her parents grow apart as they cope differently
with the situation.

The title of the novel refers not just to the radical changes of a planet where Julia can
remember tasting her “last grape” as plants die off, but to the middle-school years, “when kids
shot up three inches over the summer, when breasts bloomed from nothing, when voices dipped and
dove.”

Walker doesn’t hammer at the parallels between the global changes and the personal ones of
oncoming adolescence, but they’re there. This is both a dystopian novel, grounded in real science,
and a metaphorical one, in which Julia’s experience of growing up is echoed by the drama of her
environment.

Although everyone has a theory, no one knows why the Earth has begun to slow.

“It never
is what you worry about that comes to pass in the end,” Julia thinks. “The real
catastrophes are always different — unimagined, unprepared for, unknown.”